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August 28, 2006

Ernesto nears Cuba on track to southern Florida

by Sam Savage

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Ernesto bore down on
southeastern Cuba on Monday after drenching Haiti with
punishing rains, while forecasters issued a hurricane watch for
the southern peninsula of Florida.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center issued the watch from
Deerfield Beach southward on Florida's east coast and from
south of Chokoloskee southward along the west coast. The watch,
which means hurricane conditions could develop within 36 hours,
remained in effect for all the Florida Keys.

Florida, storm-weary after eight hurricanes in the past two
years, declared a state of emergency on Sunday and ordered
tourists out of the vulnerable Keys almost a year to the day
since Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans.

Ernesto, which was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday
after skirting southern Haiti, was pounding Haiti, the poorest
country in the Americas, with flooding rainfall and killed at
least one person there.

Cuba, facing its first big storm in decades without its
ailing leader, Fidel Castro, at the helm, evacuated 300,000
people from eastern provinces where the storm was expected to
hit the Sierra Maestra mountains later Monday.

The Miami-based hurricane center said in its 5 a.m.
advisory that Ernesto was getting better organized as it
approached southeastern Cuba and that heavy rains, floods and
mudslides were a significant threat for eastern Cuba and much
of the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican
Republic.

Forecasters said Ernesto, which had become the year's first
hurricane early on Sunday when its top winds reached 75 mph
(119 kph), would likely make landfall along the southeastern
Cuban coast later on Monday morning and possibly emerge off
Cuba's north coast later on Monday night or Tuesday morning.

The hurricane center said Ernesto could weaken over Cuba
and become a hurricane again in the Gulf with winds of about 86
mph (137 kph) as it approached Florida's southwest coast.

Tens of thousands of Cubans were transported from coastal
and mountain villages in buses and trucks.

In Haiti, a woman died after huge waves from Ernesto's
storm surge swept ashore on the southern island of Ile-de-Vache
and destroyed her home. There was an unconfirmed report of
another death in the port city of Gonaives, where tropical
storm flooding killed 3,000 people two years ago.

Residents of battered New Orleans breathed easier as the
season's first hurricane looked like it would miss the historic
jazz city. Katrina struck New Orleans last August 29, killing
about 1,500 people on the Gulf Coast and causing more than $80
billion in damage.

Oil prices fell over $1 on Monday after Ernesto weakened to
a tropical storm and its path toward Florida reduced the threat
to U.S. oil facilities on the Gulf Coast where a quarter of
U.S. oil and gas is pumped.